I was asked to talk some more about wallpaper, and I love to talk about wallpaper!
I grew up prejudiced against wallpaper, because ( Read more... )
But when we bought our 1950 wooden house in 2019 and dove into researching it we learned that wallpaper was the most common, expected wall treatment for it. I wasn't even willing to consider moving in without changing the wall surface treatments of every single room in the house, on initial walkthrough. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
waxjism agreed that things were mostly ugly, but she would totally have been willing to live with some of it for a while, and some of it forever, and my mother-in-law didn't see anything wrong with some of the wallpapers, but was just ¯_(ツ)_/¯ about my aesthetic preferences.) When we bought the house, the existing wallpapers and wall treatments were as follows: ( Read more... ).
The downstairs walls of our house are actually made out of stretched cardboard, a common and inexpensive wall material at that time that was sold on giant rolls, soaked to soften it, then stretched out evenly in all directions and nailed to the framing timbers on all four sides. This construction method was designed to be wallpapered over. We learned that we could also paint the walls as long as the paint wasn't a vapor barrier (no plastic content: traditional oil paints or distemper, tempera, or mineral paints), and we were very attached to my idee fixe that paint is cheaper and better than wallpaper; so we actually did this. We regret it! Wallpaper was the style- and period-appropriate choice and the better choice for our wall type, more forgiving of errors. The distemper-painted walls in our dining room look fine, but distemper is vulnerable to physical wear. The 0-VOC linseed-based eco paint we used in the living room took me like two weeks and like six coats because we chose a medium green and it wasn't opaque in any less. This paint also takes a long time to cure to full hardness, and as a result has various dings in it. We could've papered this room in a similar shade of solid green paper for about a third the cost and a tenth the effort, but again... we were not wise yet.
A primary consideration for us was choosing period-appropriate wallpaper and curtains that would fit the architecture and feel of the house.
Kitchen.
waxjism and I have both posted before about how we later spotted our kitchen wallpaper, by the Swedish Boråstapeter, in The Queen's Gambit (I know now that they filmed it in Europe in order to work with my idol, German production designer Uli Hanisch, so it makes a lot more sense to find the paper there...). (Illustrative screencap in an old post of Wax's here; product page here.) We fell in love with this paper when we saw a sample in a rack by the door at a wallpaper shop in Turku, actually, but we had already bought the backsplash tiles you can see here behind Sipuli from a local guy on Finland's equivalent of Craigslist (tori.fi).( Read more... )
Curved entryway wall.
There's a picture of this up above in its current wallpaper, Sanderson Hampton Trellis. (A couple more are available in this old post about my beloved rainbow ball coatrack.) I fell for this kelly-green paper with its large-scale white geometric trellis print early in house research and so didwaxjism. We knew immediately that we needed a bold contrast treatment for this curved feature wall, but we didn't decide on this paper immediately because it's by far the most expensive wallpaper we bought for the house. I spent like a year looking for an alternative that we liked even slightly as much that cost less, and we could never find one that we could be happy with. You had to visualize the size of the curved wall and its place in the room, and it needed to be a bold pattern of a certain scale with a strong contrast in it, and it turned out that most of the alternatives I could find weren't available in bold enough colors or in the right scale. It isn't 1950s, but there was a trend of chinoiserie (of which this sort of trellis wallpaper is an outgrowth) and also a trend of trellis wallpapers specifically during the 1960s (and the bathroom itself, and hence the curved wall, were added to the house around 1960 - our house and all its DIY clones from the same plans are designed to be built in stages, initially without plumbing, with bathrooms and kitchen sinks etc added later when the family could afford it). This doesn't really look quite like the 60s ones I've seen, but the connection is enough to satisfy me. The kelly green harmonizes nicely with the muted blue-green shades that dominate in the kitchen. I liked a few Pihlgren & Ritola alternatives that all weren't quite right for some reason, like Snowflake (black and white is bold but we prefer colorful!) and Pinecone (same, but mainly the scale was just too small... I really love this print and I love foresty wallpapers), Pro Finlandia (the scale is bold but the color contrast isn't! 1970s art nouveau revival vibes, a little late for us but still in the window of possibility), Paradise (60s-70s folklore/primitivism, nice bold colors and large scale, but as you see in the wall shots, the lozenges tile together into a rather even print even in the really bright colors? And we weren't SUPER into any of the color combinations.)
Living room.
As mentioned above, I painted this room a medium green with an oil-based ecological paint, chosen over distemper because the final surface can be washed with soap and water or scrubbed. We love a medium green! We love this shade! ( Read more... ) For these reasons we will not be repapering this room until after both of our bunnies have died, so it will probably be a few years, but I have looked repeatedly:( Read more... )
Dining room.
The dining room is currently distempered with a beautiful light bluey aqua, really on the edge of off white, but it's got holes ripped in it by Anubis and spots worn out from my shoulders when sitting up in bed. We can't paint and wallpaper that room (it has a huge built-in cabinet and three small closet doors that need to be repainted in our trim color as well) until Cat Divorce is over, but we have looked and looked at wallpapers. ( Read more... )
Powder room.
The downstairs bathroom, or half-bath, or powder room, or WC, the one that was put in about 1960 and fully renovated before we moved in, contains the washing machine as well as sink and toilet, and because it doesn't have a shower, we didn't have to tile all the way up the walls. The wall covering should still be basically water-resistant in case of splashing of course, and there's all that construction waterproofing under the finish so the normal considerations about non-plastic wallcoverings in an old wood house no longer apply. We started with the floor tiles, which are a dark cobalt blue with a lot of color variation, again, leftovers from some local guy on Finnish Craigslist, and we got enough of them to do both our bathrooms. The upstairs is a little shower room, so the walls are tiled all the way up to the ceiling, and we chose white, so I thought the downstairs should have dark walls that blend into the floor to differentiate it. What I really wanted was this underwater wallpaper with swimming koi carp, Derwent by Osborne & Little, or Cole & Son's Acquario which has puffer fish, but I didn't consider them because of price. I was also into similar designs of blue sky dotted with birds like Daydream by Julia Rothman for Hygge & West. In the end we painted with a color matched from the tiles and then I did this undersea mural with white Posca markers and a spray-on acrylic waterproofing coat (there's a picture of it here - maybe I've never posted 360 photos of it).
Landing.
The landing is mostly painted a light sea green, but there is an alcove with this single roll of Pihlgren & Ritola Atom in a discontinued groovy lime green (here). The wall opposite the alcove is still the off-white of the stairwell panels, which we will repaint eventually I guess, but they will still be white. This wallpaper is also inside on the back wall of the wardrobe Wax built. The rest of the library is made of wood fiber panels with a finger gap, which makes it unsuitable for wallpaper. It is painted a very bright light aqua with mineral paint. We love this color, which is an outlier in terms of our palette, but the room always feels very light and bright.
Bedroom.
The bedroom was wallpapered before, and we stripped it, put up a layer of paintable brown paper and painted that with a sort of light khaki green clay paint. Love it! But in retrospect I think I would paper the room in a floral paper in a similar shade of green like Duro Vilhelmina or Boråstapeter Borosan 21 8618. Or if price were no object, Lim & Handtryck's Tjolöholm Slott.
I grew up prejudiced against wallpaper, because ( Read more... )
But when we bought our 1950 wooden house in 2019 and dove into researching it we learned that wallpaper was the most common, expected wall treatment for it. I wasn't even willing to consider moving in without changing the wall surface treatments of every single room in the house, on initial walkthrough. (
waxjism agreed that things were mostly ugly, but she would totally have been willing to live with some of it for a while, and some of it forever, and my mother-in-law didn't see anything wrong with some of the wallpapers, but was just ¯_(ツ)_/¯ about my aesthetic preferences.) When we bought the house, the existing wallpapers and wall treatments were as follows: ( Read more... ).The downstairs walls of our house are actually made out of stretched cardboard, a common and inexpensive wall material at that time that was sold on giant rolls, soaked to soften it, then stretched out evenly in all directions and nailed to the framing timbers on all four sides. This construction method was designed to be wallpapered over. We learned that we could also paint the walls as long as the paint wasn't a vapor barrier (no plastic content: traditional oil paints or distemper, tempera, or mineral paints), and we were very attached to my idee fixe that paint is cheaper and better than wallpaper; so we actually did this. We regret it! Wallpaper was the style- and period-appropriate choice and the better choice for our wall type, more forgiving of errors. The distemper-painted walls in our dining room look fine, but distemper is vulnerable to physical wear. The 0-VOC linseed-based eco paint we used in the living room took me like two weeks and like six coats because we chose a medium green and it wasn't opaque in any less. This paint also takes a long time to cure to full hardness, and as a result has various dings in it. We could've papered this room in a similar shade of solid green paper for about a third the cost and a tenth the effort, but again... we were not wise yet.
A primary consideration for us was choosing period-appropriate wallpaper and curtains that would fit the architecture and feel of the house.
Kitchen.
waxjism and I have both posted before about how we later spotted our kitchen wallpaper, by the Swedish Boråstapeter, in The Queen's Gambit (I know now that they filmed it in Europe in order to work with my idol, German production designer Uli Hanisch, so it makes a lot more sense to find the paper there...). (Illustrative screencap in an old post of Wax's here; product page here.) We fell in love with this paper when we saw a sample in a rack by the door at a wallpaper shop in Turku, actually, but we had already bought the backsplash tiles you can see here behind Sipuli from a local guy on Finland's equivalent of Craigslist (tori.fi).( Read more... )Curved entryway wall.
There's a picture of this up above in its current wallpaper, Sanderson Hampton Trellis. (A couple more are available in this old post about my beloved rainbow ball coatrack.) I fell for this kelly-green paper with its large-scale white geometric trellis print early in house research and so did
waxjism. We knew immediately that we needed a bold contrast treatment for this curved feature wall, but we didn't decide on this paper immediately because it's by far the most expensive wallpaper we bought for the house. I spent like a year looking for an alternative that we liked even slightly as much that cost less, and we could never find one that we could be happy with. You had to visualize the size of the curved wall and its place in the room, and it needed to be a bold pattern of a certain scale with a strong contrast in it, and it turned out that most of the alternatives I could find weren't available in bold enough colors or in the right scale. It isn't 1950s, but there was a trend of chinoiserie (of which this sort of trellis wallpaper is an outgrowth) and also a trend of trellis wallpapers specifically during the 1960s (and the bathroom itself, and hence the curved wall, were added to the house around 1960 - our house and all its DIY clones from the same plans are designed to be built in stages, initially without plumbing, with bathrooms and kitchen sinks etc added later when the family could afford it). This doesn't really look quite like the 60s ones I've seen, but the connection is enough to satisfy me. The kelly green harmonizes nicely with the muted blue-green shades that dominate in the kitchen. I liked a few Pihlgren & Ritola alternatives that all weren't quite right for some reason, like Snowflake (black and white is bold but we prefer colorful!) and Pinecone (same, but mainly the scale was just too small... I really love this print and I love foresty wallpapers), Pro Finlandia (the scale is bold but the color contrast isn't! 1970s art nouveau revival vibes, a little late for us but still in the window of possibility), Paradise (60s-70s folklore/primitivism, nice bold colors and large scale, but as you see in the wall shots, the lozenges tile together into a rather even print even in the really bright colors? And we weren't SUPER into any of the color combinations.)Living room.
As mentioned above, I painted this room a medium green with an oil-based ecological paint, chosen over distemper because the final surface can be washed with soap and water or scrubbed. We love a medium green! We love this shade! ( Read more... ) For these reasons we will not be repapering this room until after both of our bunnies have died, so it will probably be a few years, but I have looked repeatedly:( Read more... )
Dining room.
The dining room is currently distempered with a beautiful light bluey aqua, really on the edge of off white, but it's got holes ripped in it by Anubis and spots worn out from my shoulders when sitting up in bed. We can't paint and wallpaper that room (it has a huge built-in cabinet and three small closet doors that need to be repainted in our trim color as well) until Cat Divorce is over, but we have looked and looked at wallpapers. ( Read more... )
Powder room.
The downstairs bathroom, or half-bath, or powder room, or WC, the one that was put in about 1960 and fully renovated before we moved in, contains the washing machine as well as sink and toilet, and because it doesn't have a shower, we didn't have to tile all the way up the walls. The wall covering should still be basically water-resistant in case of splashing of course, and there's all that construction waterproofing under the finish so the normal considerations about non-plastic wallcoverings in an old wood house no longer apply. We started with the floor tiles, which are a dark cobalt blue with a lot of color variation, again, leftovers from some local guy on Finnish Craigslist, and we got enough of them to do both our bathrooms. The upstairs is a little shower room, so the walls are tiled all the way up to the ceiling, and we chose white, so I thought the downstairs should have dark walls that blend into the floor to differentiate it. What I really wanted was this underwater wallpaper with swimming koi carp, Derwent by Osborne & Little, or Cole & Son's Acquario which has puffer fish, but I didn't consider them because of price. I was also into similar designs of blue sky dotted with birds like Daydream by Julia Rothman for Hygge & West. In the end we painted with a color matched from the tiles and then I did this undersea mural with white Posca markers and a spray-on acrylic waterproofing coat (there's a picture of it here - maybe I've never posted 360 photos of it).
Landing.
The landing is mostly painted a light sea green, but there is an alcove with this single roll of Pihlgren & Ritola Atom in a discontinued groovy lime green (here). The wall opposite the alcove is still the off-white of the stairwell panels, which we will repaint eventually I guess, but they will still be white. This wallpaper is also inside on the back wall of the wardrobe Wax built. The rest of the library is made of wood fiber panels with a finger gap, which makes it unsuitable for wallpaper. It is painted a very bright light aqua with mineral paint. We love this color, which is an outlier in terms of our palette, but the room always feels very light and bright.
Bedroom.
The bedroom was wallpapered before, and we stripped it, put up a layer of paintable brown paper and painted that with a sort of light khaki green clay paint. Love it! But in retrospect I think I would paper the room in a floral paper in a similar shade of green like Duro Vilhelmina or Boråstapeter Borosan 21 8618. Or if price were no object, Lim & Handtryck's Tjolöholm Slott.
